Saturday, January 26, 2013

Today I am very pleased to present my first Q&A of 2013. This one is with a man who I admire greatly as an artist and value dearly as a friend. I first discovered the great short films of John Levy, the co-founder of La Belle Aurore Films, a couple of years back and I instantly felt a connection to his work. We have since become great friends over at Facebook and I never tire of chatting up films, music and other similar interests with John over there. John's an incredibly intelligent and passionate artist and filmmaker and I hope after reading this everyone will take a moment to visit La Belle Aurore's official site to watch some of his terrific films, as well as like the group's Facebook page. Even more of John's work can be accessed at his Vimeo page as well.

While I was reading John's great responses here I was reminded of that line in Night Moves where Harry Moseby sums up a connection to a new friend by mentioning, "I think we saw the same films". I think any film fans who came of age in the late seventies/early to mid eighties period will really find a lot to connect and respond to here. Thanks so much to John for participating in this!

Hi John, Thanks so much for stopping by to participate in
this Q&A. To get us started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and where
you are from originally?

Thank you so much having me, Jeremy. I’m from Novato,
California. Just north of San Francisco. Where I still live. When I’m not doing
anything creative I keep pretty busy as a caregiver. I work a lot of odd jobs
as well while trying to get over as a freelance videographer.

Before I asked what got you interested in cinema and who are
some of your early influences, I was wondering if you could share with us your
first film related memory?

I have very vivid memories of watching segments of Star Wars
on an 8mm Brownie projector in my dad’s office. But my earliest memory is as a
toddler, my folks buying this mammoth Sony TV that was also a very impressive
piece of furniture. With it they got a Betamax player and a bunch of movies.
One of those was 2001: A Space Odyssey. And my earliest memory is that film
being on a lot in the house and my eyes being glued to it whenever it was. I
had no idea what was going on, but it was a fascinating introduction to movies,
history, and the future. As time goes by it continues to blow my mind. Other
films I remember being on a lot were ‘Jaws’ a lot of Bogart films. ‘Empire
Strikes Back’, ‘The Warriors’, ‘Raiders...’ and a lot of Alfred Hitchcock and
John Carpenter. 80’s horror in general was really present. When I was 9 I
scored a VHS copy of Scream Greats: Tom Savini - Master of Horror Effects.
That doc was a huge eye opener to the alchemy behind films and the actual
“making” of them. That was the first time I realized, ‘Oh, this is really hard
work.’

About those early influences, who were the filmmakers and
films that meant the most to you as you came of age?

Oh, wow. I gotta be careful here or we may have to do this
in volumes! Well, the earliest influences on me as a filmmaker would start with
Sergio Leone. Particularly Once Upon A Time In The West and Once Upon A Time In
America. My favorite films and the first two I ever bought myself. You can study
the hell out of those two films. The imagery, themes, pacing, scores, operatics
and character realizations are of the highest level of artistry. I think along
with Kubrick, Leone was one of the most visionary filmmakers we’ve ever seen.
Hitchcock was top shelf. A wealth of visual storytelling technique. Alan
Pakula, Terrence Malick, Sam Peckinpah, John Carpenter. Scorsese and Coppola.
Cassavetes. Michael Mann. Early Walter Hill and Ridley Scott. And later Kubrick
and Altman. In the mid 90’s when I started working at Video Droid I was heavily
influenced by the 90’s independent movement and classics like Wellman, Fuller,
Ray, and Lupino. And especially Film Noir and “Neo” Noir.

Specific films that influenced me are Easy Rider, The Last
Picture Show, They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Picnic At Hanging Rock. Rolling
Thunder. Cloak & Dagger (82) Certainly 2001: A Space Odyssey. Deer Hunter.
The Double Life of Veronique. Wild At Heart, The Piano. The Ox Bow Incident.
The Third Man. Charade. Touchez Pas Au Grisbi. William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.
That is a film I would love to have made. Happily with Roy Scheider too. Life
really changed when I discovered the foreign film section though. It was a
serious revelation. Melville, Antonioni, and Wong Kar Wai have definitely influenced
me. The list is endless. There are a lot of great filmmakers in the past
fifteen years and more recently to, many young ones, having a huge influence on
me. There are some women filmmakers in particular making really gutsy films
these days. I have certainly been influenced by the filmmakers outside the
directors chair and camera frame as well. Editors Anne V. Coates and Walter
Murch. Cinematographers like Vilmos Zsigmond and Gordon Willis. Costume
designer Milena Canonero. Composers like Ennio Morricone, Michael Small, and
Tangerine Dream. All these makers of movies are extremely influential.

Talk about your initial journey from film enthusiast to
filmmaker.

My brother and I used to shoot our own little movies with
our Beta cam. I always wanted to make films or play music. And as much as I
love music and came from a musical family, playing music wasn’t as much of a
passion for me as listening to it and collecting it. My Mom had done some
acting and painting and was more supportive about my artistic endeavors, but my
Dad discouraged me a lot. That held me back for years. I wrote a lot of stories
and bad poetry. I was interested in almost too many things, but nothing had a
hold on me like film. You could explore anything in film. That’s how it trumped
everything else for me. The real turning point was when I was about 16 or 17
years old. I was in a really dark place. And I remember I was sitting on the couch
flipping through channels when I landed on Roman Holiday. It was the scene
after Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn climb out of the water after their near
capture by the secret police. It’s this beautiful night time Black and White
photography. They are soaking wet and shivering and suddenly lock eyes and
kiss. It’s a beautiful scene with really striking imagery. I could feel some
kind of aesthetic transference occur. My love affair with film and filmmaking
had been reignited. That scene saved my life. And I was so eager to make up for
lost study time. I knew I really needed to do three things before I even
started to set out as a maker of movies. I had been through a lot of heavy shit
already and had narrowly escaped a bad path. I needed to really figure out who
I was as best I could outside of my interests as well as in relation to them
and what I thought about certain things and I needed to be very honest with
myself about it all. Who am I, what do I want, what do I really think?
Experiences means shit if you don’t have any perspective. The second thing I
needed to do was study as much film as possible. My first day working at the
video store I remember asking how many films employees were aloud to rent and
my boss at the time said, “As many as you like!” I think she probably meant six
to eight videos. I ended up taking something like twenty or thirty films home
that first night. Entire filmographies. I was like Tony Montana burying my nose
in a mountain of VHS. The third thing I needed to do was to find any cameras
from 35mm to DV and start developing my own eye. This was in ‘95. I started
recruiting really reluctant people into really bad videos I was trying to turn
into short films. I still had no encouragement and no fellow cinephiles in my
life at that time. I was juggling community college film courses with my job at
Video Droid.

Then while working at Video Droid between ‘96 and ‘04 I met
Terrence Kelsey (spektr, The Circle), Peter Heckel (Glimmer), Jack Graham
(who’s debut feature Jake's Dead is about to premiere) and this whole crew of
really amazing talented people. We were all film nuts and many of us were
serious about making them. And we were often collaborating on stuff. Mostly
student films. I would act in Terrence’s student films. Pete and I were working
on stuff with our pal Chris Tomera. Pete was learning animation. Jack had made
some shorts. Terrence and I were often collaborating on scripts. Pete, Chris
and I were having writer’s groups regularly. Everyone was working on something
or developing something.

Awesome, you know how much I especially dig Terrence (the link to our older Q&A is above). Now tell us about La Belle Aurore films.

La Belle Aurore is what happened when we got tired of
letting mass amounts of money stand between us and our work. Instead of
following the standard recipe we had been taught all our lives, we decided to
come at the process from a different angle. Living on a low income forces you
to make something from nothing and I truly feel film is no exception. Money
outside of your livelihood shouldn’t stand between you and your art. It’s
ridiculous. If we can’t be creative without money we aren’t creative people.
So, first we decided to see how much can we do with nothing. And gradually with
each film bring more money, more people, more of the standard requirements to
the fold as needed. Strip everything down and start all over again from
scratch. So far, so good. Tabula Rasa was our biggest budget yet and 75% of
that was for the plane ticket to bring Lovelle up. Everything before that cost
no more than twenty to fifty bucks. What you end up paying with is time. You
miss a lot of meals and sleep, but that is pretty common in filmmaking anyway.
We still don’t have any decent sound equipment. We’ve been doing most of the
acting ourselves. We steal most our locations. Borrow props. We just work with
what we have. It just means we gotta get outside the box and hustle another
way. Forget about what everyone else is doing and how. I’ve been around a lot
of people who like to “Play filmmaker” and they will never make anything.
Nothing with a voice at least. And they’ll waste your time. There is no reason
to waste time. It can all be done. There is no one way. Cinema is just coming
out of it’s infancy in my opinion. There are no rules. It’s the wild fucking
west out there!

There are a lot of different avenues one can pursue to make
films. LBA is about creative freedom. We should make films because we’re
filmmakers. However we can. We are compelled to. It’s creative sustenance.

Among your early films I am particularly enthralled by The Ghost of Love. Talk a bit about this haunting work as well as your first film
for LBA, Coda.

I’m so happy to hear you enjoyed that one. It was a personal
almost therapeutic labour of love. That one came from a feature idea. Only to
realize once again, I am not in a position to make a feature at the time. But I
needed to explore it badly. Someone who was a very crucial and special part of
my life up to that point had stopped being part of my life and we had lost this
connection or burned it out I’m still not entirely sure. Who knows why such
great things end so badly or live shortly. I was very unprepared to lose her in
any case. You know how when you’re in love with someone, you reach this scary
height of joy? For some people it dwindles over time or they run away, but in
this situation, for me it was a higher and higher feeling. A reopening of
closed chambers in the heart kind of feeling. It was almost holy to me. I’ve
lived and loved through some brutal fallout in my time but nothing that just
suddenly stops like that. It’s like death. Something otherworldly and galactic
like a star just dies out of nowhere. It was insane emotionally. I began having
weird dreams. But the incident that conceived the film was one of those
experiences when you are right between being asleep and awake. You are awake
but you are almost transitioning between plains of existence. All senses are
fully functioning in a tangible “reality”. I was sleeping when I heard her
voice. Her voice is what woke me up. I was already having another dream. I can
hear her saying my name and saying, “wake up. You’re having a bad dream.” I
wake up, my eyes tired and heavy and she is there. Her hair is in my face. I
could smell her hair, her breath, I could feel her. She whispers, “I love you.”
I then sprung fully awake and she vanished. I was freaked out. It was very
real. Very frustrating. I continued to have crazy dreams, but I wanted to get
back to that place in between. I felt like if I could get back there I could
work this out there or figure out a way to sustain my time there. I never
really did but I really thought a lot about it. I knew I should start exploring
it on film right away. And maybe I can find some kind of peace from that. And I
did. There was never a real script for that one. There was a couple pages of
voice overs and some image description. But for the most part the whole process
ended up being very experimental. And we shot for months. We ended up with
enough footage to make it 60 minutes probably. But it played better as it is.
The feature idea was much more haunting. I would still really like to do that
now that I have a little distance from the short and source.

‘Coda’ was kind of the challenge that got LBA rolling. After
having these writer’s groups for a while and having not shot anything since DV
was the latest, Pete and I decided it was time for us to start shooting
something again. We just didn’t know what. It was a major switching of gears. I
had just spent the past decade writing a trilogy of three hour movies. That’s
when Pete found out about the ‘Parallel Lines’ short film competition being put
on by Phillips and Ridley Scott and Associates. It was a challenge that really
appealed to us. As Ridley Scott fans and as filmmakers looking for a short form
project. The film had to be three minutes and everyone had to use the same six
lines of dialogue.

We didn’t care about the competition so much. What we wanted
was to be cornered into making a 3 minute short. The same time we decide to do
that we fly down to L.A. to hang out with Chris Tomera and Terrence Kelsey. On
the 1 hour plane ride down we wrote a draft of the script. A completely
different film than ‘Coda’. A Science Fiction noir. And we were set to do that
one. The only problem was it presented some minor challenges. Special FX and
suspended animation being a few of them. And we had fairly simple solutions,
but we didn’t have much time or money. That’s when I started thinking about
Coda. I wrote it. We read it. We set out on a regimen of shooting days.
Adrienne Valentine, who also worked with us at the video store and is in most
of our films came on board and we knocked it out in time for the deadline.

You have also worked on some music videos. I am curious as
to how a filmmaker correlates their own personal visions with the work of
musician (whose song is their particular personal vision) and what are the
challenges that go into it?

I’m not sure I’ve done enough to really know too much about
it yet. I will always want to hear their vision first. If we gel on the concept
I will tell them what I want to bring or suggest taking away. I haven’t faced
the challenge of vision collision yet though. The two videos I did for REAL
TALK came about very casually. We were friends already and he had been at this
music for some time but he had no videos. I ran into him at a party one night
and told him he needed a video and I wanted to shoot one. I wanted to keep it simple.
I haven’t watched Mtv in almost 20 years, so when it came to Hip Hop music
videos I was old school. I wanted to just keep it simple, keep it about him and
his message. Allow him to introduce himself. With the second video I mostly
just wanted to improve on the previous one. I wanted to keep it about him again
but bring much stronger visuals and representation. We didn’t have any budget
or anything for those. I was fortunate to have a lot of help and ideas from my
friend Babs. Between she, Jesse, and I we composed a series of nice shots.

I would love to do a narrative video and explore other
genres of music visually. I want to mix the bag with projects and genres.

Okay, I have to ask you about your extraordinary tribute to
The Deer Hunter. Please discuss this as it really is one of the most moving
tributes to a film that I have ever seen.

Oh, man. Thanks! I really appreciate that and am glad
someone likes it as much as I do. Every once and a while I get this editing
fever and I’ll be listening to a song and suddenly I start seeing images and
moments from either a movie I’m conceiving or a movie I‘ve seen. In this case
it was The Deer Hunter. It happened with Klute and Coming Home as well. I was
just listening to that Johnny Cash song a lot. And the images were cutting
together in my mind while I’m listening to this song. And then repeating and I
stop what I’m doing and just cut it together. I had to. I love the film so
much. So little is ever said about it beyond the Russian Roulette scene and
Vietnam in general. I wanted to try create a tribute that captures what the
film as a whole is really about to me. Love, friendship, home, and how
unnesecarry and destructive war is beyond the battlefield.

Okay, onto the incredible Tabula Rasa. Tell us about the
genesis of the film.

It began as a feature. About six or seven years ago I was in
the middle of writing this trilogy I’ve been working on for some time. I had
this character of Ray Hauk, that felt like he needed his own movie. I had also
been researching a lot about the world of debt bondage and sexual slavery in
America for a small scene in one of the films. I knew nothing about it at the
time. I knew it was very common in many countries, but I had no idea how bad it
was here. I questioned it initially because you never hear about. It’s the kind
of thing that should be on the front page every day. But the deeper I dug the
more I discovered how horribly true it is and how far it reaches. I knew I had
to explore something about it more. It was almost impossible to determine what
approach to take to the subject because there are so many different facets and
factions and I prefer not to be too political or preachy and just approach
things from a very human place. I knew I had to start with character as opposed
to plot with this particular project. And I started writing this story about a
woman in such a position. That had been in this world through her entire
twenties and decides to fight her way out or die trying. That became Joanie’s
story. It was strange how the two characters came together. Their lives were
existing separately in this world of my trilogy outside of it’s central plot.
And the characters separate backstories led them to a convergence. It was great
because in the back of my mind I had really wanted to tell a story about two
minuses that made a plus. Two people who each made a single bad decision at the
beginning of their adult life that resulted in the loss of their innocence and
sale of their soul. And then being resurrected by each other. The only people
they can trust are each other, flaws and all, but even more, the only people
who could ever understand them, on a deep level, are each other.

I began writing it with two specific actors in mind.
Eventually I realized I would never get them for it and then made another pass
at the script, removing the sort of tailored scenes. After many drafts I felt I
needed to explore the material live. See other people in the roles. But as far
as doing it short form I clearly couldn’t abridge the whole story. I decided to
take the first act and rewrite it as a three act short. Focusing on the
convergence of their lives and pasts and ending with the forging of their
friendship. The first act of the feature script ends almost the same way the
short ends. What follows in the feature from that point is a whole other movie
almost. About these two dim and distant lights (Joanie and Hauk) drawing nearer
and nearer.

Well, Lovelle is a Los Angeles based actress. She’s done
theater for many years and the occasional short film. We met back in 2006 on
the internet. We discovered each other through our mutual love of Zulawski’s
L’important C’est D’aimer. And more specifically our love for Romy Schneider.
We always wanted to work together and over the years I was fortunate to be able
to see brief clips of her performances and shorts she’d been in. She is very
driven and passionate about her work. When it came time to do Tabula Rasa I
knew she could do it, I had a feeling she would want to, and I knew it would be
worth it to fly her up for it. She brought a lot to the project. I am often
reluctant to work theater actors because they often want a lot of dialogue and
I am not a huge fan of dialogue. I left a lot of dialogue in the script in
hopes of workshopping it down with her. When she got here she wanted to cut a
lot of the same dialogue I did. It worked out well. She rewrote a line or two
and best of all delivered them some times in ways that would surprise me and
really elevate the scene.

Pete is the other half of LBA. He, along with Frynrare
Fletcher go back to the video store days with me and Terrence. He’s composed
all our music up to this point. He’s been there for me as an actor, producer,
composer, and brother. And he has his own worlds and stories he’ll be sharing
through LBA. La Belle Aurore’s next short will be a Peter Heckel original.

What were some of the biggest influences on the film?

Definitely a lot of 70’s American and International crime
films. Klute in particular. Visually, the most prominent influence for the
interior scenes was Gordon Willis’ work. As far as embracing darkness and using
singular practical lighting. Having been influenced by Noir as well and even
some of the Val Lewton stuff, I tend to have as much love for darkness as I do
light. Mystery, concealment, and ambiguity are important to me. The delivery of
light and information has it’s time and place. Klute even more so influential
that there are specific shots from it directly influencing shots in the film. A
lot of shots from other films were used to reference a shot. The wide shot of
Rilke and Hauk looking out over the city during their meeting is in part
inspired by a shot of Peter Cable in his office in Klute. And Joanie and Hauk’s
first scene in the bedroom is inspired by Klute as well as an airport shot of
Barry and Lena silhouetted against a window in Punch Drunk Love. The film as
a story wasn’t really influenced by anything particular though other than the
research.

I

know you are planning on turning it into a feature. Can
you tell us a bit about that?

It’s a struggle. This is where we do actually need some kind
of budget and we’re broke. But thankfully, right now, I’m really just preparing
mostly. The short was really part of that preparation. It’s a labour of love.
For six years it has lived with me and I am just inching my way along with it
right now. I’m looking forward to bigger strides. I’m finishing the rewrite
right now. And now that I have explored the material live, I know what I need
to do with it. Once the re-write is done we’ll start a search for our feature
cast and crew and private investors. Once I have a production team together I
won’t be spread so thin. I juggled way too many jobs on the short. We’ve done a
lot of location scouting already, but we still have some more. Then sometime
next year we’ll launch a crowd funding campaign. We have a lot of work ahead of
us. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve lived with these two characters for
years. They are very dear to me and I want to tell their story.

Finally, outside of Tabula Rasa, are there any other career
plans you want to share with us?

Well, LBA will keep making an assortment of short films.
Terrence and I have a horror/action script we’d love to sell. And aside from
the trilogy I have a few other small feature scripts in the works. All in
pretty early stages though. Ones a western. Another is a kind of coming of age
love story. And a post-apocalyptic thriller. I have a couple spec scripts I
want to develop as well. And an Easter Island project I want to try and get a
grant for. But I am really itching to do some sci-fi. Too many things. I have
always had a list of projects I want to do, but as I get older I find myself
looking at it and crossing some stuff off because there simply isn’t enough
time left to do it all. It’s coming down to essentials and opportunity. It’s
all part of the journey. We’ll see.

Thanks so much John! I love your work, appreciate your time
and wish you all best!

You’re welcome! Thank you for having me. I
appreciate your interest and support. It means a lot. And as a fan of MOON IN
THE GUTTER and all your extended columns, best wishes and good luck
to you!!-Jeremy Richey, John Levy 2013-

5 comments:

Loved reading this and connected to it on many levels. Where to begin? Right now I'm really trying to push myself forward on as a filmmaker despite the challenges and indifference John speaks of. I'd love to see some of his films - are they available online? (Sorry if you mentioned this above & I missed it).

I also found the description of being awakened by a friend who wasn't actually there moving and evocative; in an uncanny way it echoes a passage in my recently-completed short film. Which, by the way, I think both of you guys might enjoy/relate to given what you express here (it's in the front page of my blog this month).

And I know that half-waken, half-asleep state well - many of my most distinctive ideas have come to me then.

Finally, as someone who also loves paying video tribute to movies (and is inspired to do so by music) I'd love to see the Deer Hunter thing. Not to sound redundant, but how can I do so?

Thanks for this, Jeremy. A great read and good timing for me right now.

Wow, you guys, what a rich conversation. My brain is whirling right now.

I have also loved getting to know John through Facebook (and one epic comments thread on my site about the movie DOGFIGHT). But this!! I was so moved listening to him talk about his influences, and the struggles to get started with something - I think we all can relate to that. I was unaware of John's Vimeo page, however, and I will go there immediately.

I am the editor and co-creator of the upcoming quarterly publication Art Decades as well as the author and creator of various film and music blogs including Moon in the Gutter, Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience, The Arrival of Sylvia Kristel and Harry Moseby Confidential. I live in Kentucky with my wife Kelley, our two dogs Molly and Maizie and our cat Mazzy.